parcc-logo-purplejpg-54a6aed43765c4b0Last week, the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) released preliminary score reports for this spring’s PARCC assessment. Here are five important points to understand about these scores.

  1. The scores are only preliminary. The scores are aggregated at the state level, and school districts have not yet checked the data to eliminate duplicate student records or other inconsistencies. These statewide scores may change once the data has been cleaned up.
  2. The scores are out earlier this year. The 2015 PARCC assessment was the first time it was used. As a result, scoring the test also required determining what the benchmarks were for the five score levels on each question. That delayed both the initial release of scores and the individual student scores. The final student scores will be included in the Illinois Report Card release on October 30, compared to December 11 last year. Your individual student’s score report will be provided by your school district in the next month or so.
  3. The scores are an honest assessment of student achievement. The preliminary scores show that statewide, 36.2% of students are meeting the English/Language Arts Illinois Learning Standards and 30.5% are meeting the Math Illinois Learning Standards. These scores are in line with the ACT’s most recent report on college readiness, other student assessments, and remedial courses taken by college students. With the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the definition of school accountability is returned to the states. It is up to the citizens of Illinois to ensure that the state does not lower standards to show success and continues to provide an honest measure of student and school success.
  4. ISBE’s PARCC Place is your source for assessment information. ISBE has collected a variety of resources and new for educations, families, students, and administrators at PARCC Place. Use PARCC Place to find out what is happening with assessment in Illinois and how to interpret your student’s and your school’s results.
  5. PARCC is changing again next year. The 2016 PARCC assessment reflected feedback from school districts, educators, and families, moving from two testing windows to one and reducing the amount of testing time. The PARCC assessment will be changing again in 2017, with only grades 3 through 8 taking the PARCC and high school students taking the SAT instead. One reason for this change is the complications of administering a class-based assessment at the high school level where students taking the Algebra II assessment could be freshman, seniors, or in between. A second reason is the US Department of Education’s determination that Illinois’s decision to allow school districts to decide whether to use the 9th, 10th, or 11th grade assessments in their district violated No Child Left Behind’s requirement that all high school students take the same assessment. Third, the College Board changed the SAT in the spring of 2016 to align with the Common Core State Standards, which are essentially identical to the Illinois Learning Standards, making the SAT an applicable assessment for the high school level. Finally, both ISBE and citizens from across Illinois felt that it was important that the state provide every high school student with a college entrance exam, especially after no such exam was provided by the state in 2016 due to the state budget crisis.